Israel’s pugnacious Foreign Minister is trying to put a legal veneer on his proposal to transfer Palestinian citizens into a future Palestinian state. Avigdor Lieberman has long pushed for stripping Palestinians in Israel of their citizenship, and now has a legal document in his hand claiming that his plan is in line with international law.

The legal document, first reported by Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, is an attempt by Foreign Minister Lieberman to insert his ideas for transfer into the mix as the U.S.-led peace process comes down to its final weeks. Lieberman wants to transfer Palestinian areas in what’s known as the Triangle–a group of northern towns and villages near the Green Line–to Palestinian Authority control in exchange for Israeli annexation of large settlement blocs like Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion. An estimated 300,000 Palestinians live in the Triangle. In total, about 1.5 million Palestinians have Israeli citizenship.

Ravid reports that Ehud Keinan, a Foreign Ministry legal adviser, concluded that a transfer plan would be in line with international law if it fulfills three conditions: the consent of the Palestinian Authority; a prohibition on making a Palestinian stateless; and a compensation scheme for those who are left outside of Israel’s borders. The document cites historical precedents like the agreement to give French colonialists three years to choose between Algerian and French citizenship–an ironic example, since in this case it would be the victims of settler colonialism who have their citizenship stripped.

Tellingly, the document floats the idea of transferring the land and its inhabitants without their express consent. In Ravid’s telling, “Keinan says in the legal opinion that while the right to choice is accepted practice, it is not required by international law.” If the proposal ever becomes enacted, the opinion lays the groundwork for stripping the citizenship of Palestinians without their consent, since the vast majority of Palestinian citizens are vehemently opposed to such an arrangement. Palestinians reject being transferred to legitimize illegal settlements, and fear that a Palestinian state would still be subject to the whims of Israeli control. Palestinian Authority officials have previously rejected any population transfer.

The transfer plan, associated with Lieberman but backed by Israelis across the political spectrum, fulfills a number of key objectives.

As the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jamil Dakwar outlined in the Journal of Palestine Studies, the plan decreases the number of Palestinians within Israel, always a key concern for the self-described Jewish state that is constantly worried about Palestinian birth rates. Since the transfer proposal would be part of an agreement that establishes a Palestinian state, Israel could worry less about the ratio of Jews to Palestinians living within its territory. Secondly, it would give Israel the right to annex key settlement blocs it has always wanted international legitimacy for. And thirdly, it would remove what Israeli officials have called a “fifth column”–Palestinians within Israel. In recent years, Palestinian citizens have issued calls for Israel to change into a state of all its citizens–demands that the Shin Bet head called a “strategic threat to the state’s existence.”

Despite the Foreign Ministry’s determination, any plan to transfer Palestinian citizens would raise at least alarm bells in the international community. And as Dakwar notes, the plan could conflict with international treaties like the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which states: “A contracting state may not deprive any person or group of persons of their nationality on racial, ethnic, religious, or political grounds.” Israel is a signatory to the treaty.

Palestinian activists and Members of Knesset slammed the proposal in response. Officials from the city of Umm al-Fahm called the proposal a “second Nakba” and said, “we are the children of this land. We inherited it from our ancestors, and nobody can speak or negotiate on our behalf in any future agreement with the Palestinians.”

About Alex Kane

Alex Kane is a freelance journalist who focuses on Israel/Palestine and civil liberties. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

technically israel would not really be ‘giving up territory ‘, as alex pointed out:

Secondly, it would give Israel the right to annex key settlement blocs it has always wanted international legitimacy for.

also the triangle is used as a dumping ground by settlers. it’s an environmental nightmare (more to that story…) . whereas the land the settlement blocks which would be ‘traded’ are prime locations. big dif.

Annie — I didn’t know about the little triangle as a dumping ground, tho I’d read that dumping (toxics, chemicals, trash, sewage, nuclear(?)) was being done in the West Bank.

This suggests new conditions (to be publicly spoken) by PLO on the negotiations (not to get to peace but to educate the world): “We will not settle for land which has been trashed, nor will be settle without equitable sharing of water and replacement by Israel of stolen ground-water (iniquitous previous use of West Bank aquifer).”

The proposal also — on the basis of your “dumping” information — makes it clear (and this should be said out loud, too) that Israel regards Palestinians as trash to be dumped into a new, smaller Palestine — and expects the USa and Palestinians to go along with the idea.

@pabelmont- Hasn’t Palestine (thanks Hostage) made the statement that any land swaps had to be of equal value? I don’t know how assertive that might be, but iirc at least they’re aware of the attempted “con.”

pablemont, my memory is sketchy and i have no idea if i saved the link and don’t have tome to look. here’s what i did. i found a map that colored in the area lieberman wants to trade, i found the name of the village/villages and googled them by news. i may have used google translate and switched them into hebrew to check the hebrew press (more local news) and then i found the articles. they just come and dump crap in the middle of the night and the locals complained they can no longer use certain areas for agriculture. it was a long ongoing problem.

Israelis are always trying to swindle the Palestinians; and dumping non-arable, contaminated land on them, while setting outrageous racist, undemocratic legal precedent in exchange for what they stole from them which is leagues better, is and always will be in their agenda.

The Israeli version of any peace deal is a landfill of bad faith, ill will and immoral deeds.

Secondly, it would give Israel the right to annex key settlement blocs it has always wanted international legitimacy for.

Alex claimed this would be done as part of a plan that will establish the State of Palestine. It will also establish the State of Israel too, while supposedly ending all claims. So this scheme would still violate international law, since it doesn’t repatriate the Palestinians displaced in order to create those illegal settlement blocks after the 1967 war, construct the wall, and etc. The “Palestinian Authority” cannot conclude a valid international agreement that violates a jus cogens norm of international law, i.e. the crimes against humanity, including the forced population transfers, that this MFA advisory opinion desperately attempts to sweep under the rug.

This is neither right nor legal. This is a case of a racist state enacting racist laws (which become nullified outside Israel by International rule of law) to cleanse away the undesirables which act represents one of the cornerstones of Apartheid’s foundation, and to create a homogeneous, purified supremacist state that can then pretend to be a democracy, because the challenge to the integrity of that democracy has been eradicated.

“The source of that fantasy was Israeli Army Radio. See U.S. denies plans to free Pollard for peace link to haaretz.com”

Let’s hope so. Reading the original story, it doesn’t suprise me that Netanyahoo had decided to renege on the Israeli’s previous agreement: you can’t trust the Israeli state on anything, for any reason. Further, given Kerry and Obama, the claim that they’d free this traitor for some pointless pandering to Tel Aviv wouldn’t surprise me, which, in and of itself is telling.

@Hostage. The fact that there are no plans doesn’t mean that there might not be. The DOS briefing (y’day) shows they wriggle endlessly from any commitment that such a possibility might not come into existence.

QUESTION: I mean, I understand it gets brought up by the Israelis, but my question more is: Is this brought as kind of a carrot by the U.S. to get the Israelis to —
MS. HARF: I’m not going to go into anything that’s being discussed on this or any other topic privately.

The Palestinians would be foolish to accept the deal. It would be a “lose-lose” situation for them:
– Israel looks good for releasing “Jew-haters” and “Jew-killers” and the Palestinians look bad for celebrating their release; and
– Israel gets eight more months of Zio-supremacist “facts on the ground” supremacist state-building at the end of which i) the Palestinians are no further ahead and ii) the Israelis – with the help of donkey-fellating Western politicians and media – can once again successfully claim that they have no partner for the peace for which they so desperately long.

>> Very revealing. Lieberman would rather give up territory than live on equal terms with Palestinians.

“Liberal Zionist” RW had similar feelings about equality:
>> “I personally don’t see a conflict with intentionally adjusting boundaries if the demographics change considerably to create a smaller Israel that is Jewish majority.”

IOW, maintain Jewish supremacism in Israel – and maintain Israel as a supremacist “Jewish State” – by re-drawing borders so as to exclude from Israel areas with large, non-Jewish populations. (Such an action would effectively strip those non-Jewish Israelis of their Israeli citizenship and render them stateless, but this didn’t seem to bother RW.)

Lieberman’s proposal is interesting to me for this reason: it validates my idea, posted long ago (2010), that Israel could live with PRoR (not that I hear Lieberman saying he’d accept PRoR) and also maintain a large Jewish majority within its own territory if Israel contracted its borders (removed to a smaller territory).

Of course, my idea was for Israel to make itself really small — as small, say, as New York City (all five boroughs) which has about the same population as Israel. That way, the PRoR would allow return of a small number of Palestinians because those that would return to the newly smaller Israel would return to a smaller area: fewer Palestinians would have been exiled from that smaller place in 1948 and therefore fewer would be entitled to return to it post-peace.

Of course, Lieberman is not proposing this plan. But he is pointing at it. He is saying that Israel does not have to be as large as it had hitherto desired to be.

Now we need only to get him (i.e., to get Israel) to agree to give up not only this small triangle of land but also all of the territories occupied in 1967. Oh, well.

That way, the PRoR would allow return of a small number of Palestinians because those that would return to the newly smaller Israel would return to a smaller area: fewer Palestinians would have been exiled from that smaller place in 1948 and therefore fewer would be entitled to return to it post-peace.

Notwithstanding your last sentence which implies (mind you, not in so many words) Lieberman’s unquestionable bad faith, and that thankfully deals in reality; what you’re basically saying in the first part is that it’s okay to encourage or further the cause of supremacy in exchange for a modest Right of Return.

Oh lord, help us, if now we’ve come down to indulging supremacy! To actually conceive such a disturbing precedent makes me shudder, but thankfully the reality that exists makes such considerations impossible. I hate to think what you’d say if that impediment didn’t exist.

Perhaps opens the way for the awesomely brilliant RoHa three state solution.

A scrap of desert for a Jewish State, separated by a chain-link fence from an equally tiny Arab state for those who don’t want to live with Jews. The rest of the country for decent people who are prepared to make an effort to get on with the neighbours.

By my creaky math eliminating 300,000 Arabs from the citizenship rolls would cut the untermensch population by a quarter. Along with the raising of the election threshold this will effective eliminate Arab participation in national politics. This is how fascism takes hold, not in one fell swoop but in increments.

“Despite the Foreign Ministry’s determination, any plan to transfer Palestinian citizens would raise at least alarm bells in the international community.” Those alarm bells have been going off for some time with no effect. Israel knows that it has a cadre of support that will forgive them anything. The old guard Jewish leadership has NEVER stood up for human rights in Israel and they never will.

Lieberman wants to transfer Palestinian areas in what’s known as the Triangle–a group of northern towns and villages near the Green Line–to Palestinian Authority control in exchange for Israeli annexation of large settlement blocs like Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion

If it hasn’t yet been annexed to Israel, it ain’t Israeli.

Furthermore the territories of the Triangle have never been legally annexed to Israels Internationally recognized territories (per UNGA res 181 http://wp.me/pDB7k-Xk )

Israel’s only friend in this debacle, the US, more than a century ago adopted the legal custom of annexation by agreement in order that territories, even those won in war became a part of the US.

Texas, Hawaii, even Alaska were annexed by agreement. By adopting that legal custom, the US was instrumental in the legal custom passing into Customary International Law. Added to which being a signatory to the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, the US cannot legally recognize any territories Israel has acquired by war and never legally annexed.

The Israeli lobby’s demands for US support put the US in conflict with the its legal obligations. Lieberman’s vile plan simply ain’t gonna fly.

Ravid reports that Ehud Keinan, a Foreign Ministry legal adviser, concluded that a transfer plan would be in line with international law if it fulfills three conditions: the consent of the Palestinian Authority;

Right wing Zionists and Mondoweiss still intentionally decline to recognize the occupied State of Palestine. Nonetheless, the PA was a creature of the defunct Oslo Accords that ceased to exist more than a year ago after 130+ countries voted to upgrade Palestine’s status in the UN to that of an observer state. See ‘PA officially changes name to State of Palestine’ ‘PA officially changes name to State of Palestine’ http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/PA-officially-changes-name-to-State-of-Palestine

The document cites historical precedents like the agreement to give French colonialists three years to choose between Algerian and French citizenship

The big news is that the MFA advisory opinion cited an ICJ case involving a frontier dispute, which destroys the Israeli and US proposition that boundaries of disputed territory can only be established through negotiations.

The other modern era cases that were cited are inapposite, since they dealt with the transfer of sovereignty as a result of decolonization of an entire territory (Algeria and Hong Kong) and didn’t attempt to target indigenous ethnic groups for exclusion from the resulting polities.

and a compensation scheme for those who are left outside of Israel’s borders.

The MFA advisory opinion fails to address the legal issue of repatriation with regard to the Palestinians displaced in order to establish the illegal Israeli settlement blocks, the construction of the Wall, and the Nakba. In other words, it’s just a hair-brained grand apartheid scheme intended to violate international law.

“Across the board” Israel just can’t seem to reconcile with its founding sins/mythology/Zionist wet dream of a purified ethnic state.

Far from Ari Shavit’s (et.al.) much-heralded view of “That was then, but this is now. We’ve come a long way baby!” feel-good nonsense (targeted at vacillating American Jews), Israel still operates in “That was then, and that is now. We are who we’ve always been.” mode.

Hopefully (Thankfully?) American Jews are vacillating, at least partly, for cause.

Well, as I keep saying over and over again, if you wait long enough, every Zionist will eventually justify the Holocaust. And here you have them repeating the early 1930s playbook of Germany stripping Jews of thier German citizenship without thier consent. Oh, well, I guess that crime against humanity will no longer be raised by Yad Vashem, Simon Weisenthal, etc., in detailing this era.

The more settlements Israel builds, the more of a bind they are getting into, if they withdrew to their legal borders the demographic situation would be approx 75% Jewish, 25% Arab and others, and therefore a guaranteed Jewish majority for the foreseeable future, unfortunately that huge tract of occupied Palestinian land called Area C where most of the settlements are [and the water] and inhabited by only a small number of Palestinians, means that the Israelis will want to annex, somehow, all this area. In my opinion and to make matters worse, no Israeli Government will give up its claim to sovereignty over the whole of the land of Israel [as they see it] that’s why no maps are ever presented by the Israeli side in these futile negotiations, the Israelis [and US] want another year for negotiations, to buy time, unfortunately they are pushing on an open door, because Abbas has almost declared that negotiations are an end in themselves and is reduced to being openly blackmailed over the release of 25 prisoners, due for release in any case under the previous agreement, maybe the Israelis will promise to release those prisoners if the Palestinians agree to extend the talks. You could not make it up.

I heard Obama at the EU/US Summit again making a case for sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea when the people of Crimea used the democratic process to overwhelmingly express their desire to be part of the motherland.

So just imagine the staggering hypocrisy and illegality of transferring spoiled, polluted land in Israel without regard for the democratic and legal rights of the Israeli Arab citizens who live in that area just so Israelis/Zionists can purify Israel of undesirables whom they view as a demographic threat and to further the cause of supremacy. Imagine that kind of deviant precedent? It’s morally and legally inconceivable, rife with staggering hypocrisy and an outrage to humanity.

“And as Dakwar notes, the plan could conflict with international treaties like the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which states: “A contracting state may not deprive any person or group of persons of their nationality on racial, ethnic, religious, or political grounds.” Israel is a signatory to the treaty…”

I believe that there is no such thing as Israeli nationality – nationality and citizenship are entirely different things. If this is so, the Convention cited above would appear to be irrelevant. The odious Lieberman’s wet dream of simply shipping the inconvenient Palestinian Israelis out of Israel would not constitute depriving the victims of their nationality, but of their citizenship, a situation about which the Convention appears to be silent.

The fascism just effervesces out of this Moldovan punk – a veritable human Sodastream of thuggery.

It was a part-time job when he was a student in Israel. By the way, I knew very nice people from Moldova, and I am a bit miffed by harping on the origin of FM and his part-time jobs.

It is much more interesting that he was found innocent of corruption and working with Russian mafia because all witnesses refused to testify — it shows that some mafias are competent at their job! Or that he cruelly murdered Israeli national anthem — hardly a murder of an innocent, but still, such cruelty should not be condoned.

“The transfer plan, associated with Lieberman but backed by Israelis across the political spectrum”,- this sentence needs some facts to go with it in order for it to be accurate rather than vague and misleading. What percentage of israelis back this plan?

The idea of transferring territory to the new Palestine is widely accepted in the diplomatic versions of a peace accord between Israel and Palestine. The idea of revoking Israeli Arab (Palestinian Israeli) citizenship is widely rejected in the world. Although it seems clear that the purpose of this transfer is a means by which of revoking that citizenship, purely logically, the land can be transferred, while the Palestinian Israelis living there will keep their citizenship. If a Palestinian Israeli moves to Toronto he remains an Israeli. His children born in Toronto may not be Israeli, I don’t know what the rules are, but he remains an Israeli. Thus a Palestinian Israeli whose hometown moves to Toronto (so to speak, actually moves to Palestine), could remain Israeli, but regarding his children again I don’t know what the rules are. The use of Kupat Holim, Health services, which would disappear from the towns that were Israel and would now become Palestine, would be a reason to move to Israel proper and to object to the proposal for the moving away of Kupat Holim is a reason to work against the idea. Also if you want your yet to be born kids to have the right to live in Israel (assuming that the Toronto children are not automatically Israeli) is another reason to object to the idea. But purely logically there is no reason that a transfer of land needs to involve the revocation of citizenship.

Given the history of the Israelis, there would be no reason to transfer the land if it wasn’t going to end up revoking the citizenship of Palestinians. The quest for the Palestinians land, but not the Palestinians, has been the goal of the Zionists from the beginning. So we’re now supposed to believe that they’ve had some great change of heart??? Do you really think people are such suckers as to believe that?

There is no reason to believe that the supremacist “Jewish State” of Israel won’t revoke the citizenship of non-Jewish Israelis excised from it. How else to prevent all those dirty Aye-rabs from immediately re-infesting it?

But let’s pretend that Israel decided not to revoke the citizenship of excised non-Jewish Israelis. It’s almost a given that the property values of excised homes and lands would instantly drop. And since there’s no reason to believe that Israel would compensate said former citizens of Israel for their financial losses, a non-Jewish Israeli-unwillingly-turned-former-citizen-of-Israel would instantly be at an economic disadvantage if he were to choose to return to Israel.

A financial blow isn’t quite as elegant as a revocation of citizenship, but if it reduces the chances of dirty Aye-rabs finding their way back into supremacist “Jewish State”, it’s better than no blow at all.

@ yonah fredman “The idea of transferring territory to the new Palestine is widely accepted in the diplomatic versions of a peace accord between Israel and Palestine”

Problem. When one looks closely one discovers the territory Israel wants to transfer to the new Palestinian state is already Palestinian territory. Israel has never legally acquired ANY territory outside its self proclaimed borders of May 14th 1948. http://wp.me/pDB7k-Xk

” purely logically there is no reason that a transfer of land needs to involve the revocation of citizenship.”

Complicated. According to Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acquisition of nationality (sic) by birth is granted to:

“Persons born outside Israel, if their father or mother holds Israeli citizenship, acquired either by birth in Israel, according to the Law of Return, by residence, or by naturalization.”

This suggests that the children of those Palestinian Israelis in your Toronto example would have citizenship, but their grandchildren would not. Also, the Ministry’s website seems to use nationality and citizenship interchangeably, which, as I have suggested above, they are not.

Either I am wrong and nationality and citizenship are coextensive in Israel (but I am not wrong – the Israeli Supreme Court settled the question in 2013, citing the danger to Israel’s character the acceptance of Israeli nationality would represent), or else the Ministry is being purposefully coy to disguise the profoundly premodern nature of the nationality/citizenship distinction in The Only Democracy in the Middle East, or the Ministry has hired very sloppy scholars to compose its pronouncements.

I am not sure if one can describe the proposal as “illegal”. A peace treaty can pretty much agree on anything. It remains preposterous.

Clearly, the top concern of Palestinians is that they were stripped of their property and communal rights (land in their communities that was classified as “Sultan’s domain”, Israeli prime ministers view themselves as sultans with all feudal privileges when they do not pretend to be modern folks), and exchange of land makes some sense if they are compensated with land for confiscation of land given to settlements. Transfer of the Triangle does nothing of the kind.

@Piotr – A peace treaty may “agree on anything”, but I am not so sure about collective, compulsory population exchanges. They have rightly been described as abominations and major crimes even with some ridiculous fig leaf of a majority vote. In this case, it’s a no go also because there is no corresponding sovereign state on the other side.

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